Background
In my first Post, I told you how to become more successful by making small changes in the way you consciously deal with the world.
In this and my next Post, I’m going to talk about what’s required to sharply ratchet up your successfulness to a much higher level.
The bottom line is that in order to sharply increase your successfulness, you must bring your Unconscious Mind as well as your conscious mind into the picture.
What Is Your Unconscious Mind?
In the simplest terms, your Unconscious Mind consists of the parts of yourself that you are not consciously aware of.
“The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of.”
Looking a little deeper, imagine a great big circle (see the illustration below).
What’s within that circle represents your Unconscious Mind and what’s outside represents everything else including what might be called the Collective Unconscious, the spirit realm and the God realm.
Within that big circle, imagine a very small circle defined by a fairly thick line. what’s within that very small circle represents your Conscious Mind.
The fairly thick line that divides your Conscious Mind from your Unconscious represents your Subconscious Mind. The Subconscious Mind contains what’s on the edge of conscious awareness.
Just one more definition.
There is a constant massive stream of communication from your Unconscious Mind, across your Subconscious Mind into your Conscious Mind. This is called the Stream of Consciousness.
And, as you can see from this illustration, everything that comes into your conscious mind comes from your Unconscious.
Why Is Your Unconscious Mind So Important To Your Successfulness?
The answer is that:
Your Unconscious Mind does all the doing.
What?
Yes, everything you do is done unconsciously and you only become consciously aware of it after the fact.
I know that may not make sense but lots of hard medical research demonstrates that we only become consciously aware of our actions about a half second to a second after we take those actions.
So, for the moment, please take my word for it:
Everything we do, we do unconsciously.
I’ll prove that statement through your own experiences in just a minute.
Given that your Unconscious Mind does all the doing, unless you can find a way to consciously choose what your Unconscious does, you are consciously out of control. Only when your Unconscious habitually does what you consciously want, do you get what you consciously desire.
In order to become significantly more successful in getting what you consciously want, you must find a way to consciously communicate with and manage your Unconscious Mind.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Do you know how to do that, how to consciously communicate with and manage your Unconscious Mind?
Almost no one does.
But wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were an organized way that we could learn to consciously communicate with and manage our Unconscious Mind so it consistently gives us what we consciously want?
Actually, there is.
I invented it and I call it Cybernetic Transposition.
Proving That Everything You Do Is Done By Your Unconscious Mind
I asked you to bear with my statement that everything you do is done by your Unconscious Mind.
Now I am going to prove that by your own experience.
Let’s start with an example that’s very familiar to most of us, driving a car.
Please remember the very first time you drove a car.
Wasn’t it pretty terrifying?
You had to consciously think about how to do each little thing ? how far to turn the steering wheel, how hard to press the accelerator, how to get the car to go where you desired, how hard to press the brake and when to back off ? and, especially, how to not hit parked cars, etc., etc., etc.
I know that I was drenched with sweat after my first short drive. I felt exhausted, physically, emotionally and mentally. That was really hard work.
Now, compare that memory of your initial driving experience with how you drive today. If typical, you pay almost no attention to the mechanics of driving. You think of where you are going, what’s for dinner, how to fix some problem at work, etc.
The actual driving is easy because, from a conscious point of view, it’s pretty automatic.
Your successful unconscious habit patterns that you developed through extensive trial and error and repetition are doing the driving. They are dealing successfully with the complexity of the world through which you are driving.
Here’s another example, reading.
You probably can’t remember learning to read but I can assure you that it was extremely challenging.
The first thing you had to do was to recognize that some squiggles were letters. Then you had to learn that letters put together properly made words and to associate those combinations of letters with the spoken version of those words. Then you had to recognize the meaning of words and associate that with the appropriate combinations of letters? etc., etc., etc.
To give you a better idea, watch a child learning to read and ask them about their experience of the process..
In contrast, for you now, reading is automatic. Isn’t it?
Automatic, that is, unless you try to read Russian when you don’t know the Cyrillic alphabet, don’t know the language and don’t know the way sentences are structured.
Try that and you may remember what it was like when you first learned to read English.
Now you read English automatically thanks to a multiplicity of complex unconscious habit patterns that you developed through extensive trial and error and repetition.
Let’s Dig A Little Deeper
Do you consciously control how your heart pumps the blood that keeps you alive?
Of course not.
That and all of the other bodily processes involved in keeping you alive operate completely unconsciously?
…unconsciously, that is, until your Unconscious sends your conscious mind a message such as “We need food” in the form of you consciously feeling hungry.
…or if something goes wrong such as when I had a heart attack a couple of years ago.
But even then, the only way I knew something was wrong with my heart was that in the hospital my electrocardiogram consisted of a series of equilateral triangles rather than the usual curved waves. What I consciously experienced was that I was unconsciously driven to deeply gasp for breath every second or so for minutes, until I fell on the floor.
What About Something That We Are Consciously Aware Of, Seeing?
Have you ever thought about how we do that? It is a marvelously complex process. It is so complex that it staggers the imagination as I describe in the Appendix at the end of this Post.
Yet we are consciously unaware of essentially any of that process. We just experience what is in front of our eyes after our Unconscious Mind points them there.
We’re not aware that our Unconscious is running the process until it prevents us from seeing something that we expected to be there, if we realize that’s the case.
For example, have you ever misplaced your keys?
You look where you were sure they were and you don’t see them. So you look at every other likely spot and they?re not there either.
Then you go back to the original spot and, lo and behold, your keys are exactly where you initially thought they would be.
For reasons that I’ll discuss in the next Post, your unconscious decided to block you from seeing them when you initially looked.
A Way To Get A Better Handle On What We Are Unconsciously Doing
While seeing is very familiar, the experience of the process by which that experience is created, as described in some detail in the Appendix, is extremely unfamiliar because it takes place entirely unconsciously.
But here is an example of a familiar successful unconscious habit pattern where we can experience a little more of what’s actually going on.
Please, right now, just get up and walk to the door. Then come back to this Post.
No kidding, you should really do this so you get my point.
Please stop reading, get up, walk to the door and then come back to the Post.
Now, compare your current experience of standing up and walking with what you went through as a small child while learning to do so.
You probably don’t remember that from your own childhood but think about the remarkable number of trials and errors that a small child makes in learning to stand up and walk. Remember his or her first teetering steps.
Compare that with what you do to walk now. Normally, you pick a destination, stand up (with or without conscious awareness) and you walk to your destination while consciously thinking of all sorts of other things.
You now pay essentially no conscious attention to the mechanics of walking unless you are injured. Your Unconscious normally does essentially the whole job without conscious involvement.
Walking is another example of a successful unconscious habit pattern. It’s so successful that you’re typically unaware of it in operation.
But if you consciously really slow down the process of walking, focusing closely on each action you take, you will begin to see some of what you are doing unconsciously when you walk.
And if you learned to ski later in life, as I did at age 39, you probably remember how difficult that was and how much practice it took to habitually do the right thing so that you skied smoothly.
Skiing is, however, just a very minor variation on the remarkable skill of standing up and walking that we, as children, taught ourselves. Yet learning how to implement that minor variation as an adult is tough for most of us because we don’t know how to consciously communicate with and manage our Unconscious Mind.
Consciously Communicating With And Managing Your Unconscious Mind
Through my process that I call Cybernetic Transposition, you can change self-defeating unconscious habit patterns to successful ones, create new successful unconscious habit patterns, build new skills and enhance existing ones.
And through the Cybernetic Transposition Three-Step version of what I taught you in my last Post, you can consistently achieve seemingly impossible objectives.
The Cybernetic Transposition Three-Step consists of:
- Setting a precise Target that is accepted and supported by your conscious mind and all major aspects of your Unconscious.
- Unconsciously Prioritizing that Target so your Unconscious remains closely focused on achieving it, no matter what you are consciously doing or thinking.
- Resolving the Unconscious Roadblocks that would otherwise prevent you from reaching your Target.
When you perform each of these steps properly, you have a nearly 100% probability of achieving your Target, even if it seems to be impossible.
That’s confirmed by one hundred percent of the detailed feedback of the participants in my Super Achiever Coaching Program over the past 9 years. Of those who did at least most of the assigned work, 95%+ achieved their seemingly impossible objective on their very first try. And during the past 3 years (as I have improved the process), 100% have done so.
I think you’ll agree, that’s pretty remarkable.
It illustrates the tremendous power over your life that you can develop when you learn to consciously manage and communicate with your Unconscious Mind.
What We Just Covered
I demonstrated how our Unconscious does all the doing in our life and explained that to sharply increase our Successfulness, we have to apply the 3-Step Process I described in my first Post to our Unconscious functioning.
I’ll tell you more about that in my next Post.
Appendix — How We Actually See
I’m going to give you a brief overview of the marvelously complex process we unconsciously perform that produces the result we call seeing.
It starts with the eyes. Light is focused by the lens component of our eyes. These lenses unconsciously changes shape to bring what we are staring at into focus.
The image is focused on the retina, which is actually an extension of the brain. The retina consists of three layers of image processing that detect what are called in artificial intelligence “features” such as a corner but that really consists of a class of features, each a corner in a different orientation. Or the class of straight line segment, each in a different orientation. It is estimated that the eye detects about 100 classes of features as well as color and movement while the lens system provides the data required to detect distance.
Of course, this all takes place unconsciously.
Each retina sends about 1 million items of information per second through the Optic Nerve to what is called the Optic Chiasm. There, part of the data from each eye is combined into two data streams. The first goes to what is called the Visual Cortex of the brain to eventually produce what we see while the second goes deeper into the brain where it is processed in a way that produces so-called Blind Sight — the ability of people who are blind because of damage to the brain, not the eyes, to, for example, guess correctly how many fingers you are holding up in front of their eyes.
The stream headed toward the Visual Cortex first goes through a remarkable six layer processing center called the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) where the incoming signals from the eyes are reshaped to match images already stored in memory within the brain. In other words, the LGN enables you to more accurately see what you have seen before.
Thus, a major league football coach can precisely see the details of what his players are doing that ordinary people just can’t see at all because you can’t see what is not in your unconscious repertoire of images… that have been put there through extensive focus and repetition.
For example, about 50 years ago, explorers in the heart of Africa who were working with very primitive tribes discovered an unusual phenomenon.
One tribe had a prohibition against any images of humans, believing that creating such images captured their soul. Thus, they had no visual experience at all of an image of a man.
So when the explorers showed them Polaroid photos of themselves, they were unable to see them.
I’m pretty sure that you have experienced this effect of unconscious blanking of what you see (but one that doesn’t arise from the same unconscious process) as follows.
What these primitive people experienced was something like what happens to you when you can’t find your keys because your Unconscious has blanked your awareness of them. You look where you’re sure you put them but they aren’t there according to what you see. Yet later, after searching all over the house, you return to where you originally looked and there are your keys.
The operation of the LGN is a mixed blessing. It can make you far more perceptive about what you’ve already embedded in the brain but can prevent you from seeing or seeing what’s going on with anything that is not.
Continuing with my description of how we unconsciously create seeing, from the LGN, the signal moves into the visual cortex in the back of the brain. There, the incoming signals are processed in very complex fashion through three independent pathways:
- One for form.
- The second for color,
- And the third for spatial information.
A major task for the brain is to construct three interrelated frames of reference for both visual perception and the control of movement:
- A two dimensional map of what you’re looking at.
- A head-centered frame of reference – whereby anything that moves with the movement of the head remains stable.
- A body-centered frame of reference that combines the previous two frames of reference with information on posture.
Thus, one frame of reference is built on another.
Given this system, you can recognize something in varying sizes and contexts, a most remarkable skill.
One can compare the perception of visual form to the hearing of a melody. What we recognize in a melody is not simply the sequence of particular notes but their interrelationship. A melody played in different keys will still be recognized as the same melody because the relationship of the notes remains the same.
Likewise, we are able to recognize different images under a variety of visual conditions, including differences in illumination, because the brain maintains the relationships between the components of the image.
Finally, there is a very complex mechanism by which the brain momentarily associates the information being processed independently by different processing systems (only a few of which I’ve discussed) in differing parts of the brain. This mechanism, as yet unspecified, is called the Binding Mechanism. In other words, we know what it does but not yet how it does it.
As you can see, our normal process of seeing is a titanically complex process. Yet we are completely consciously unaware of this process.
We just open our eyes and see.
Yet an infant does not do that. They have to teach themselves to see. That’s why an infant looks, chews on and explores the feel of objects. They are learning to correlate those experiences with the mass of inputs from their visual processing system in a way that trains that system.
And that training becomes a part of their Unconscious Mind.
Thus, we all see differently as a result of our differing experiences as we learn to see and thereafter. What one person sees when they look at a particular object is quite different from what another person does.
In that lies the ability of artists to see, for example, what Van Gogh saw when he painted “Starry Night”.
To conclude my description of seeing, if you would like to learn more about this process, I recommend an article by Andrew T. Sornborger of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine that you can access via the Internet at the following web site. This is the best discussion of this process I have ever seen and I have incorporated a few of his comments in the above description.
